FoxyAI Sponsors the Inaugural Be Like Jeff | Live Heads Up Golf Tournament

FoxyAI was proud to sponsor the inaugural Be Like Jeff | Live Heads Up Golf Tournament and support the effort to share Jeff’s story.

On September 13, about sixty golfers stood on a green at Stone Creek Golf Club in the Oregon drizzle for a group photo, then played eighteen holes in intermittent rain at the first Be Like Jeff | Live Heads Up Golf Tournament. Nobody complained. It would have been hard to, given who they were playing for.

Be Like Jeff: The Coach Who Was Given Five Years and Took Forty

To understand why, you have to know Jeff.

In 1983, Jeff Young was a 21-year-old college football player who noticed he was having trouble holding a guitar pick.

The tests came back ALS. The prognosis came with it: three to five years.

That was more than four decades ago. Fewer than one percent of people diagnosed with ALS live this long. Jeff Young is one of the longest-living survivors of the disease anywhere in the world.

He did not get here by luck. In his own words, he got here by deciding what to believe.

“When I actively constructed in my mind the man I would become and the life I would lead, a life that felt pathetic and doomed was transformed to one of purposeful destiny.”

The Coach Who Cannot Speak

ALS took Jeff’s voice years ago. A caregiver interprets for him. Writing a single message can take him hours.

He writes one every week.

For about twenty years, Jeff has been an official coach at Lake Oswego High School, one of the most successful football programs in Oregon. Every week in season, the coaching staff reads one of his letters to the players. The team’s battle cry, LO48—play every one of the 48 minutes—came out of one of those letters. The head coach has said no one in the program has influenced the kids more than Jeff.

ESPN told his story in a twelve-minute feature. The Trail Blazers gave him a number 48 jersey. And every August, the Oregon Ducks bring him to fall camp, where this year head coach Dan Lanning read Jeff’s message to the team: (DOWNLOAD THE VIDEO HERE).

“Picture a high-performance engine sitting silent. Hundreds of engineered parts. Now spread those parts across a garage floor, and what do you have? Thousands of dollars of extraordinary energy and zero horsepower.

No part is the power. The power is created by what the parts do together. The greatest value may not be the power that you produce yourself. It may be the power you unleash in somebody else.”

That was as strong a case for the power of a team as most people in that room had ever heard. It came from a man who has had every reason for forty years to make it about himself, and never has.

Be Like Jeff | Live Heads Up

A few years ago, Chris Love Dudley, founder of Live Heads Up, created the Be Like Jeff | Live Heads Up campaign to move the focus beyond ALS awareness. She wanted people to see Jeff for who he is as a person—not simply as a man in a wheelchair with ALS—and to share his wisdom with a much broader audience.

The Live Heads Up message of optimism, grit, resilience, and keeping your head up in thought and action fit Jeff and the way he has chosen to live. Ahead of Lake Oswego High School’s annual “Red Out” game, shirts and wristbands were made and sold, and during the game the student section began chanting “Be Like Jeff,” embracing the campaign and the idea behind it.

One of Jeff’s own letters captures what that means:

“A warrior is one that can be depended upon when conditions get rough. Everyone is born with the seed of greatness and, therefore, has the ability to acquire the warrior soul.”

What Comes Out When You Are Squeezed

One line from Jeff’s letters explains the rest of them:

“What comes out of you when you are squeezed is what is inside you.”

Jeff has been squeezed harder and longer than almost anyone alive. What comes out is a weekly letter to a group of teenagers about how to be better men.

Jeff lives on a fixed income that does not come close to covering the round-the-clock care he needs. To learn more and help defray the cost of Jeff’s care, visit youngwithheart.com.

Be Like Jeff | Live Heads Up!